KYC/AML experience: what to screen for in product hires

Job specs for iGaming and FinTech product roles almost always include a line about "KYC/AML awareness." In practice, that phrase gets interpreted very loosely — anything from "has heard of it" to "has personally redesigned an onboarding flow around a regulator's findings." The gap between those two candidates is enormous, and a generic screening question won't surface it.

The first thing worth checking is whether a candidate can describe KYC and AML as product constraints, not legal add-ons. Know Your Customer and Anti-Money Laundering requirements shape onboarding friction, deposit and withdrawal limits, and how quickly a player can start using a product. A candidate with real exposure will talk about these as design inputs they've had to balance against conversion — not as a wall legal put up after the fact that engineering had to work around.

A useful interview probe is to ask about a specific tension they've navigated: verification friction versus drop-off. Every operator wants onboarding to feel fast. Every regulator wants identity and source-of-funds checks done properly before meaningful money moves. Candidates who've actually owned this will have a real story — a tiered verification approach, a risk-based check that only triggers past certain thresholds, a redesign that moved a check later in the funnel without weakening it. Candidates without real exposure tend to give you the textbook answer: "we made sure to comply with KYC requirements," with no specifics underneath it.

It's also worth probing how a candidate has handled an actual escalation — a suspicious activity pattern, a regulator inquiry, or an internal audit finding. You're not looking for legal expertise; that's not the PM's job. You're looking for whether they know their role in that process: who they loop in, how fast, and what they consider their own responsibility versus compliance's. Candidates who've been through this once tend to be noticeably calmer and more procedural about it than candidates who haven't — it stops being abstract.

One thing to watch for on the other side: candidates who've absorbed so much caution that they can't ship. Genuine KYC/AML fluency includes knowing where the actual risk lines are, which means also knowing where they aren't — where a control is being applied out of habit rather than necessity. The best hires we've screened can tell you not just what they added, but what they pushed back on removing unnecessarily.

Finally, don't assume this experience only exists in gambling or crypto. Candidates coming from banking, payments, or other regulated FinTech often carry a very transferable version of this fluency, even without a single day in iGaming. The label on the industry matters less than whether someone has actually built inside a compliance perimeter and made real tradeoffs within it.